Matthew Klam

marlene lopez

Matthew Klam is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Sam the Cat. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His writing has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. Who is Rich?: A Novel (Random House), his most recent book has been named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Every summer, a once-sort-of-famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a class at a weeklong arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. Once more, Rich finds himself, in this seaside paradise, worrying about his family’s nights without him and trying not to think about his book, now out of print, or his future as an illustrator at a glossy magazine about to go under, or his back taxes, or the shameless shenanigans of his colleagues at this summer make-out festival. He can’t decide whether his own very real desire for love and human contact is going to rescue or destroy him.